Internets of Interest – 13 August 2014

Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 13 August 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

Vendors like to supply prepared quotes for journalists to use in articles. Journalists like to use them since they fluff out a rewrite of press release quite nicely. So when Chris Mellor at The Register writes “quote cannery” this, I laughed hard.

Free ebook from Juniper on OpenContrail. I read it and its highly recommended to get an understanding on the approach to SDN that Contrail takes. Contrail chose to use MPLS, BGP and GRE as the protocol foundation and this difference can be off-putting since it is so different to other approaches.

This Day One book provides an overview of OpenContrail, the Juniper technology that sits at the intersection of networking and open source orchestration projects.OpenContrail is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that is built using standards-based protocols and provides all the necessary components for network virtualization – SDN controller, virtual router, analytics engine, and published northbound APIs.This Day One book reprints one of the key documents for OpenContrail, the overview of its architecture. Network engineers can now understand how to leverage these emerging technologies, and developers can begin creating flexible network applications.The next decade begins here.

Juniper Day One series are always very good and lots of free books on Juniper technology to review.

Kevein Dooley thinks that CCIE Program has been devalued. He makes good points that I find difficult to argue with. The days of complex internetworks that used routing protocols are over because it’s cheaper and more reliable to buy more bandwidth, more routers or simply rebuild the network. Using nasty router hacks is not a good solution when working in low cost, high reliability systems.

The problem with the CCIE certification is that, despite the difficulty of the exam, the credential has been massively devalued in the last decade because too many people who really aren’t qualified have somehow managed to pass the exam, and because being able to pass an exam is not the same thing as having skill in the field.

On the other hand, knowing the deep details does provide a useful understanding. The old CCIE program had a component that encouraged personal skills, work habits and good communication but these values were lost when Cisco Learning took over the program. I feel that the underlying purpose and goals of CCIE training has changed over time and the Cisco Learning division haven’t kept the program relevant to modern networking. Of course, the definition of modern networking is no longer clear with private cloud and SDN disrupting the future landscape so there may be no clear answer.

Mellanox contributes MLAG code to the Open Ethernet program

“Mellanox continues to drive the community effort to enable Open Ethernet switch solutions for cloud, web 2.0 and enterprise data centers,” said Amit Katz, senior director of Ethernet switch product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The open source MLAG release allows companies to improve their switch software stack by offering their customers enhanced network resiliency and better utilization of their network.”

On the other hand, Mellanox is an Israeli company and with the recent outbreak of one sided violence in Gaza, I’m reluctant to consider this a good thing. I won’t be recommending Mellanox unless some form of peace is found in Gaza. (both sides need to find peace and funding the national economies of both sides will prolong the violence).

Interesting project to add L3 routing and other services to Neutron and Nova in OpenStack

Loved this: “However, we found we were able to say something more clearly and with a bevy of excellent synonyms by using the Sanskrit word अखण्ड (akhaNDa) which has such lovely connotations as “non-stop,” “undivided,” “entire,” “whole,” and most importantly, “not broken.”” and “Akanda is in use at DreamHost for our OpenStack-based public cloud, DreamCompute. As we work on bringing Akanda to the community, we will be working on additional documentation, user guides, etc.”

Sometime ago, I linked to a presentation on using Fourier transfoms to look for syncrhonous patterns in logs from applications, servers and network devices. This blog posts responds that after testing the practical application of the idea is hard, probably too hard to be practical.

I studied physics in college, and I worked in computational research, so the Fourier Transform was a huge deal for me. In his talk, Noah gives some really interesting takes on the application of digital signal processing techniques to ops. I came home inspired by this talk and immediately started trying my hand at this stuff.

We’ve put together some recommendations for you. The list includes some of the most high-profile networking bloggers in the industry, including Greg Ferro, Ivan Pepelnjak, and Ethan Banks. Other big names include Lee Badman, Jason Edelman, Terry Slattery, and Ed Horley.

Very good article on the nature of open source and how small companies that develop software can be used by big companies.

Well, welcome to the modern world of open source, Gruman, where the vast majority of successful open source projects are exactly like this. Take a look at OpenStack, Linux, or any other commercially mainstream open source project. They’re all written by (wait for it!) companies — not for peace, love, and freedom, but for sales, market share, and customers.

The rise of open source businesses and software is a defining issue for all IT infrastructure since many cloud platforms use vast amounts of open source code, development platforms, languages and much more. You need to understand the open business model and how it changes the market.

Another day, more problems on the Internet but this time due to TCAM limitations in obslete Cisco routers. Looks liek Verizon made a mistake on their filtering which allowed 15000 extra routes into the global routing table.

Now that we know that there was indeed an increase in prefixes it is time to look into where these prefixes came from. Looking at the our data we quickly see that the new prefixes being announced at that time were almost all originated by the Verizon Autonomous systems 701 and 705. All of the new routing entries appear to be more specific announcements for their larger aggregate blocks. For example BGPmon detected 170 more specific /24 routes for the larger 72.69.0.0/16 block.

The Ethernet Alliance is an influencing organisation for the IEEE. It brings mostly complete standars to the IEEE for approval (which begs the questions why have the IEEE at all ? )

The justification for the 25GbE CFI is to form a study group to explore providing a single lane 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25GbE) specification for server interconnects to support server-ToR implementations based on the new 25GbE interface. This justification is based on the development of the underlying 4x25Gb/s architecture that supports 100GbE. Those familiar with the development of 40GbE may recall that 40GbE was identified as the next server rate back in 2007 by the then IEEE 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group. While 40GbE has found much market success in data center networking, the 2007 forecast that the market would be shipping 40GbE based servers in volume by 2014 was optimistic, which is leading to speculation of the validity of the entire conceived rate scheme from the 40GbE / 100GbE project. It should be pointed out that such debate now has the benefit of hindsight of what happened, as opposed to the situation at the time of the Higher Speed Study Group, which was required to make the best decisions it could, based on the information it had at the time.

John D’Ambrosia is one the lead influencers on Ethernet standards and talk about the 25GbE and that the forward IEEE roadmap may need to be changed. Worth reading to see that the IEEE is no longer in control of Ethernet and that the roadmap will change.

About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

Popular Categories

General Content

Subscribe to my Human Infrastructure Magazine

A bi-weekly newsletter on a network human in IT Infrastructure.

IT Infrastructure is like a puzzle with hundreds of pieces. Some pieces are hardware, some are software and some are business processes. But the most important pieces are the people who design, deploy and operate the technology. Some news, links, opinions. Not too serious and a people focus.

First Name...Last Name...I don't sell your personal details

Your email address is never shared.

Network Break is round table podcast on news, views and industry events. Join Ethan, Drew and myself as we talk about what happened this week in networking. In the time it takes to have a coffee.

Copyright Greg Ferro 2008-2015 - Thanks for reading my site, it's been good to have you here. Opinions, Views and Ideas expressed here are my own and do not represent any employer, vendor or sponsor. Full disclosure